Gardener

                      Here's a book review I published about 15 years ago in an obscure online journal the name of which I have long since forgotten.  I know it's sort of long, but it's a good review of a powerful book.  As they say in poker, "read it and weep."     Proulx, Annie.   Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999. (283 pages, $25.00)             This is a collection of stories about “the damned human race” (to use Twain’s phrase). The Wyoming world that Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Annie Proulx creates here is so bleak, so dismal, so unflinchingly harsh, and yet so powerfully evoked that my response each time I completed another story (I read one long story a night till I finished the book) was to shudder and ask myself why I continued to read.             But I did continue, drawn, I think, by the power of the storyteller and a hope for hope.  One of these stories, I said to myself, will reveal at least a hint of kindness,

The Ogallala Aquifer is an American treasure.  Yet most Americans don’t know or care about it, for the Ogallala cannot be seen with the naked eye but only by an educated imagination.  If you drive across Nebraska heading for more gaudy treasures like Mount Rushmore or Grand Canyon, you might notice huge green crop circles of corn and soybeans.  An educated imagination might tell you that these crops are being irrigated by water that lies beneath the ground’s surface.  And they are—water from the Ogallala Aquifer. And then if you knew the Ogallala contains approximately a million billion gallons of water, which is to say about 2.9 billion acre feet of water, you might begin to develop a sense of amazement about the Ogallala Aquifer.  An aquifer, as you probably know, is not an underground lake but something like a huge underground sponge—made up of water, sand, silt, clay and gravel.  The Ogallala is the largest aquifer in the United States and one of the largest in the world.  I

My wife and I have seen four of the Oscar best-picture nominees, Philomena, Twelve Years a Slave, Nebraska and American Hustle.   Of these, Philomena is clearly the best picture. Why?  Well, of course, it stars Judy Dench.  Who’s better?  And her co-star, Steven Coogan is first rate as well.  Not only that, but, along with Jeff Pope, he wrote the screenplay. And it is the screenplay more than the acting that makes this movie great. The story, which is a true story, has deep significance, eternal significance one might even say.  Based on the book Philomena by Martin Sixsmith (Sixsmith, played by Coogan, is the journalist who help Philomena unravel the mystery of her son’s life), the movie tells the story of an Irish woman who got pregnant out of marriage as a young girl, gave up her child to the nuns, watched helplessly as her child was spirited away while she worked in the convent’s laundry, and then as an older woman set about to find her child. When Philomena and Six

In 1907 Abraham Kuyper began a series of 158 articles on the lordship of Christ, collected as Pro Rege.  It is best read, says James Bratt, as “his diagnosis of the West one decade into the twentieth century.” One of Kuyper's concerns is a “general decline of religious consciousness” in people, which he attributes, in part, to the dissolving of the self,  caused by increasing technology, an unprecedented knowledge explosion, and a preoccupation with mammon, that is, wealth and the accumulation of wealth. We might respond with a yawn and say, “just another old man who can’t adjust to the changes that time inevitably brings—Wordsworth in the 18 th century exclaiming that “the world is too much with us,” that “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Thoreau in the 19 th  century lamenting that  “The civilized man has built himself a coach but has lost the use of his feet.”  Schelhaas in the 21 st century complaining about Smart phones and Twitter and Instagram.

In a couple of weeks I will chair the Sioux County Democratic Party Convention.  That news will not impress anybody who knows anything about the Democrat Party in Sioux County, for we probably represent less than 5 % of the voting population. Furthermore, I am not even president of the Sioux County Democrats—merely vice-president. If I could choose my identity as a Democrat, I would prefer to call myself a Christian Democrat, but that phrase, which has some significance in Europe, has virtually no cachet and conveys no real meaning in the United States.  But I have been thinking that it might be time to organize a wing of the Democratic Party called the Christian Democrats.  Let me explain. In the last weeks I have been reading James Bratt’s biography, Abraham Kuyper, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat.  Yes. There it is.  The great Neo-Calvinist political leader of the Netherlands between 1870 and 1920 (and patron saint of Dordt College), when he visited the United States a

More than thirty years ago, I developed and taught a high school course called Mass Media in which one of the primary units dealt with advertising.  The focus of the course was not to help students become effective marketers of some product but to become discerning users of mass media.   Since mass media—newspapers, books, radio, television, and (the just emerging) computer services, etc.—filled  much of the world our students lived in, we (the English Department of West Michigan Christian High School) believed that they should understand how media worked and how it worked on them—informing, persuading, inspiring, manipulating, and seducing them.  In that context I used Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and became convinced of its significance. Recently I picked it up again, a ripped and tattered paperback with lots of underlining and folded corners of pages, and was again convinced of its significance. As I read it, I wondered if anyone today is worried about the moral issues

Vance Packard was not the only one concerned with the effects of motivational research applied to advertising back in the 1950’s.  Even Public Relations people were asking themselves probing questions.  Nicholas Samstag in The Engineering of Consent wrote, “It may be said that to take advantage of a man’s credulity, to exploit his misapprehensions, to capitalize on his ignorance is morally reprehensible—and this may well be the case . . . .  I do not know.” W. Howard Chase, president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1956 said, “The very presumptuousness of molding or affecting the human mind through the techniques we use has created a deep sense of uneasiness in our minds.” I could add another hundred such quotes from ad men and scholars of the fifties to these, but I would have to conclude the list by saying that in the end all this concern made little difference in the practices of ad agencies and businesses.  Nor did they evoke much concern in the minds of th

It’s Super Bowl week and the air waves are buzzing with talk and previews of some of the multi-million dollar TV ads that will be appearing during the broadcast of the Super Bowl.  Why do corporations pay 4 million dollars for a 30 second spot?  Well, the obvious answer is that they are guaranteed the largest viewing audience of the year. But a more basic question is this:  Does the advertising work?  Does it move people to go out and buy the products that are being advertised?  And this is a question that applies not just to Super Bowl ads but to most advertising.  Do people buy stuff—stuff they did not plan on buying, stuff they did not realize they needed--because they see/hear/read ads? Does advertising work? Of course! Would tough-minded, bottom-line oriented businesses spend $4 million for a half minute if they were not certain that it works? The still more important question is this:  What does advertising do to us?  Fifty-seven years ago, in 1957, a man by th

The temperature in Sioux Center yesterday was about 15 below, with a wind chill 7 octaves below middle C. Weather like this invariably provokes comments about global warming—sometimes aimed at me because I am an outspoken believer in the existence of global warming and its accompanying dire consequences for planet Earth.  “So, what do you think about global warming now?”  someone in  The Fruited Plain might say to me.  In the last week our daily newspaper, The Sioux City Journal, has had two cartoons ridiculing global warming. What can I say?   I can remind everyone that we are talking about global temperatures—not Iowa temps or North American temps.  Most Americans can define global in the abstract, but when it modifies “ warming,” they seem unable to apply it to the noun.  Here are some examples of why that is significant:          November, 2013, was relatively cold in northwest Iowa, but globally it was the warmest November ever .           Even though in the